How porn affects people’s attitudes to a normal sexual relationship: SL leading the way in respect of pubic hair?

Only marginally connected to naturism, and I’ll come to that in a moment.

Anne Robinson is a veteran UK journalist, and her name will be known to any UK readers. Recently, a young feminist, Grace Campbell, asked Ms. Robinson, who had never encountered porn before, to look at it and give a reaction to how people are portrayed as well as how else it may be affecting sexual relationships. What they watched together is quite disturbing in some aspects, although it’s good to see that Ms. Robinson’s acerbic tongue is still well to the fore.

Ms. Campbell is absolutely correct about online porn now appearing to drive the expectations in real life sexual relationships with ‘choking’ and anal sex now expected to be part of ‘the deal’. From a personal perspective, yuck! to both, but these are elements that wouldn’t really fall within the remit of SLN. Make your own judgements on those.

The naturist element of the video is where pubic hair is concerned, because pubic hair is very much a ‘thing’ within naturism. It’s discussed from the 2’28” mark, with Ms. Robinson acidly saying that ‘obviously no one in porn has any pubic hair’. Ms. Campbell reports that 66% of females in the 20-24 age group had totally or partially removed their pubic hair in the past month!

She goes on to say that if it’s a woman’s choice, that’s fine, but if partners say things like ‘it’s dirty’ or ‘I won’t sleep with you unless you wax’, or -most amazingly of all- ‘women aren’t supposed to have hair down there’ then ‘porn is having a very negative impact on the way men react to women’s bodies‘.

Quite clearly I have my own personal perspective on this, as anyone who reads the blog will be aware. It’s natural, it’s there for a reason, it’s more than fine. I’m not advocating that everyone is required to have it, but I would be advocating that everyone has a right to make their own choices about it, not because porn infers we must all be bare down there.

Within RL naturism I remain in a minority by ‘keeping it natural’ and I’m baffled that naturists, who are fairly stern in their disapproval of equating nudity with sex should therefore be at the forefront of following what is a porn trope by almost totally, as a community, following that porn trend. We pride ourselves on our alt-lifestyle choices by being naturists. Why should we then feel that we must look like something from a porn movie?

Happily, with SL, the situation is somewhat different. Six years ago, in a drive to make my avatar as realistic as possible when I started my SL, I bought pubic hair for my avatar to wear. I was, I felt at the time, almost alone in that. Indeed, there were sims I would visit when I definitely was alone in that. In recent times, and certainly over the past year, I’ve found that more and more female avatars are now wearing pubic hair. Why? As it’s not yet at the forefront of RL fashion, it seems as though it’s a sub-conscious trend that is probably reflecting the RL female’s personal grooming habits. What’s more, it seems to add to what I -and probably many other female avatars- would see as part of an adult woman’s femininity, rather than the Barbie/little girl look that probably remains the majority fashion. SL may be leading the way in this respect. Certainly I don’t expect to see wall to wall carpeting, to coin a phrase, in SL anytime soon. Nor indeed do I expect to see it in RL naturism in huge numbers when I go on holiday. But things are changing. I’m afraid that the 20-24 male age group, if Ms. Campbell’s thought provoking video is anything to go by, are in for a shock.